06 July 2019 10:19 AM

SOME years ago, I proposed to my then boss an article about the huge bill for Housing Benefit, which was running somewhere north of one per cent of gross domestic product.

“The price we pay,” he suggested, “for selling all those council houses.”

Similarly, whenever I hear of a particularly bonkers Employment Tribunal case, or demands for yet another swathe of workplace “rights”, I reflect that this is the price we pay for having lost strong trade unions, particularly in the private sector.

Broadly speaking, the more powerful is organised labour, the less need there is for detailed employment legislation – or, indeed, for a minimum wage, once described by the great economist John Kenneth Galbraith as a second-best substitute for unions.

For example, until the early Seventies there was no such concept as unfair dismissal – the only way a sacking could be legally challenged was if it were in breach of an employment contrast. True, the early moves towards today’s labyrinthine structure of workplace entitlements did coincide with the last hurrah of the old union dominance.

But the real expansion of what the late Peter Simple may have called “Britain’s number one growth point” came after the sun went down on much of the Fifth Estate.

For example, the original concept of equal pay for equal work mutated into equal pay for work of equal value (a dodgy concept, in my view) and, in our own century, this has been joined by the bizarre notion of the “hypothetical comparator”. In an all-female workplace, an imaginary male employee can be dreamed up and, it is assumed, this non-existent man earns more than the actually existing women.

Not only did the expansion of employment legislation coincide with the decline of trade unionism, it also mirrored several decades of historically high levels of unemployment. Some of a free-market disposition argued that workplace rights created joblessness by deterring employers from taking on people who could turn rapidly into liabilities. The present jobs boom would seem to refute this, although the rise of the “gig economy” suggests employers have rebalanced away from in-house personnel and towards freelancers (white collar) and casual labour (blue collar).

Striking this balance is a critical judgment that each employer has to make, and to get right.

Otherwise, the hypothetical comparator will be coming to get you.

Saturday bits and pieces

I have written a rear-view review for the Lion & Unicorn site of John le Carre’s masterpiece Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. You can read it here. For fans of the book, can I suggest we have all overlooked the glaringly obvious fact that Oliver Lacon of the Cabinet Office is a Russian spy? Here’s the rap sheet: he sacks super-sleuth George Smiley and appoints useless Percy Alleline as head of MI6 with Soviet mole Bill Haydon as number two; he refuses to give Smiley various files during his attempts to unmask the mole; he practically orders Smiley to make no connection between the mole and the supposed British agent in the KGB, “Merlin”; he refused to tighten security at the camp at which Haydon is being held, thus Haydon is killed and Moscow no longer needs to bargain for him. I rest my case.

Meanwhile, are you as relieved as I am that England are out of the women’s world cup? We won’t have to listen to BBC hacks drooling about “the lionesses” in between having orgasms at the prospect of stopping Brexit, or Boris, or both.

A fond farewell to Christopher Booker, author, journalist and former editor of Private Eye. His book The Seventies was a particular influence for me. Sadly missed.

Finally, I had been about to buy this week’s New Statesman, but had a precautionary flick through first, landing on a letters page dominated by Spartish correspondence about the basically totally and totally basically unacceptability of independent schools. I bought the Literary Review instead. A bullet dodged, methinks.

29 June 2019 10:00 AM

EVEN someone my age cannot remember the “quota quickies”, sub-standard domestic films churned out to meet the legal target for British movie production first set in 1927 and finally repealed in 1960.

I do remember “support films” that ran before the main feature – from memory, A Hard Day’s Night was preceded by a documentary called Railways of Tanzania­, in Hull, at any rate – but that’s a different story.

Well, stand by for the return of the quota quickie, not (for now) in the cinema but elsewhere in the arts. It was in June last year that Lionel Shriver, writing in The Spectator, published chunks of a memo from the publisher Penguin Random House to literary agents, committing the company to having its authors “reflect UK society by 2025…taking into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability”.

Mm. I have been a Random House author in the past and wonder how my co-author and I would fare now, given that between the two of us we include an ex-public schoolboy, an Old Cantabrigian, a Justice of the Peace, and a lay reader.

Anyway, PRH chief executive Tom Weldon wrote to the magazine to insist that “more diverse voices” will actually raise standards, not lower them. As I said at the time, why keep us waiting until 2025 to share these riches?

Over to the National Theatre, which is committed to “reflect the diversity of the population of the United Kingdom in our work on stage”.

Then there’s the British Film Institute: “We are working to ensure the projects we fund, the programmes we curate, the audiences who watch them and our staff are representative of the UK. We have set ourselves inclusion targets and developed diversity standards for all the activity we fund and as a tool for the wider industry.”

Then, of course, there’s ITV, whose head of “comedy” Saskia Schuster said a few days ago she would no longer commission shows from all-male writing teams. Presumably, any chaps keen to sell their wares to ITV need to stick a woman on the team, rather as Malaysia’s predominantly-Chinese business community used to be obliged by law to appoint to each company board a couple of “directors” from the majority Malay population.

What, through an economic lens, does all this add up to?

First, if the production of anything – films, books, comedy scripts, tractor parts, baked beans – is partly or wholly dictated by the need to fill quotas, there is likely to be misallocation of resources. Incentives are important. If a book editor, for example, is currently judged on the commercial success of the authors they sign, that is a clear criterion providing clear incentives.

Should that be superseded by a different criterion, such as signing up “more diverse voices”, the editor will work to that. In the process, generating returns by pleasing the end-customer, the reader, will be less important than filling the quota.

Second, it may be objected that it is possible to combine the traditional commercial criterion with the “diversity” criterion. Sorry, but one will have to predominate. That’s the way of the world.

Third, critics of all this quota-mongering have themselves come under fire for suggesting that people in the favoured groups are less talented than those who are “over-represented” at present. Given that talent is spread evenly across the population, it is said, no harm can come from handing out contracts in proportion to the demographic percentages of each group.

The trouble is, quota-mongers feel free to apply this logic to the arts and a few other fields, such as the lower ranks of the civil service and the staffing of local government, but would not dream of doing so in relation to, for example, air-traffic control, brain surgery or hostage rescue.

Why? Because deep down they believe the latter type of work matters and the former probably doesn’t really. Put more charitably, perhaps they subconsciously grasp that the penalties for failure from un-funny comedy scripts, boring plays and films and even mediocre routine public administration are considerably lower than they are in the second, critical type of occupations.

The bottom line is that either these assorted organisations are serious about quotas or they are simply spraying around some feel-good phrases. If the latter, they are storing up trouble for the future, as there will be plenty of people out there “monitoring progress”.

If the former, then a lot of sub-standard work is going to be produced as commissioning staff struggle to hit their “diversity norms”. Bring on the quota quickies.

Bits and pieces on Saturday

I fear my main item last week, about the growth of petty officialdom in contemporary Britain, may have been a little unfair in tone. In a low-growth, low-wage economy, petty officialdom can seem an aspirational career choice to someone of limited education. In fact, so desirable does it appear to some that items of the petty official’s kit are on sale for private use.

There is, of course, the fluorescent bib beloved of officialdom, not to mention the bits of stripy tape seen not only at crime scenes (fair enough) but in a baffling series of situations apparently to make everyone’s life more difficult. And there are the plastic no-parking cones that give the spurious impression of authority and which aspiring petty officials seem fond of sticking on the road outside their homes, regardless of any legal right to do so.

All this amateur activity threatened to rob the real petty officials of their status symbols, so a new one had to be found. It is the walkie-talkie, on railway stations, building sites, shopping centres, anywhere, really, endlessly squawking at high volume, the unpleasant aural effusions underlining the petty officials’ imagined authority over the rest of us.

SO Theresa May’s made-up offence of controlling behaviour (introduced when she was Home Secretary and designed to snare overbearing husbands, boyfriends etc) has resulted in a woman being arrested, by four members of our tragically understaffed police force, for asking her husband to help with the housework. She was charged but the “case” collapsed. You’d need a heart of stone not to laugh.

ONCE again, my old paper The Guardian is chasing after readers who will always hate it, calling for lower taxes on the rich, for “competitive” (i.e. low) wages for the workers, and for longer prison sentences. And once again, I am kidding, and it is The Daily Telegraph that is making a fool of itself in a desperate bid, presumably, to snare “Millennial” readers. On Tuesday, we had a piece demanding longer paternity leave in order to help women stay in the workforce; on the same day we learned that “Women in top professions are less likely to have studied at Oxbridge than their male counterparts” (a big so-what? factor there); on Thursday, the sports section devoted five pages to the women’s world cup and, on the same day, an enormous feature was headed: “My stay-at-home dad gave up his career for me” (apparently, this ought to happen more often but doesn’t). Once the most sceptical of newspapers, it is rapidly becoming the most credulous.

FINALLY, in parallel with the perverse incentives offered by a quota system, I am indebted to business guru Professor Gavin Kennedy for this anecdote from the days of the Soviet-bloc version of the Common Market, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON). Member states traded baskets of goods among themselves, thus the clear incentive was to put low-quality goods from one’s own country into the basket and hope to get something half decent from other countries. One of the most egregious examples, said Professor Kennedy, was “Polish cement”, which wasn’t proper cement at all and would have been barely much use as wallpaper paste.

22 June 2019 10:00 AM

MANY years ago, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, a friend and fellow journalist was sent to Romania, then still under the non-benign control of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

On his return to London, he and I had a drink and he mentioned that one adult in seven, or maybe one in 11 – an enormous figure, at any rate – worked for one or other branch of the security police.

How did it feel to be in such a country? I asked.

He laughed. “Very secure.”

That’s something, I suppose. Britain has been transformed into a nation of petty officials without any concomitant increase in the average person’s sense of personal safety. Quite the opposite.

Never mind the epidemic of knife crime. Here’s a lower-key example, from that haven of petty officialdom, public transport.

I change trains at Oxted in Surrey on my return journey, and quite frequently the station seems to be some sort of gathering point for “rail enforcement officers”, a new-ish breed of quasi police official. It is hard, however, to see what it is they enforce.

Certainly not the rules against playing music or other recorded material in train carriages – they are nowhere to be seen, which means that neither do they instruct people not to broadcast the other half of their worthless mobile-phone conversations for the rest of us to hear.

I suspect they are glorified ticket collectors, although it could be likely that, faced with a determined fare dodger, they may conduct a swift “risk assessment” and let discretion be the better part of valour.

So how big is petty-official Britain, this insecure security state? Here are some numbers.

There are 10,000 senior police officers (inspector and up), 143,000 officers up to sergeant and 19,000 community support officers. Add in 13,000 “parking and civil enforcement” bods, 202,000 security guards and 60,000 “protective services associate professionals”, and we get to nearly half a million people, 447,000.

This is, however, almost certainly an underestimate. Elsewhere in the statistics are a number of categories that almost certainly contain more Warden Hodges characters (for younger readers, he was a power-crazed air-raid warden in Dad’s Army).

There are 56,000 health and safety officers, 38,000 “inspectors of standards and regulations” 40,000 “child and early years officers”, whatever they may be – I’m pretty sure we managed to keep our kids out of the clutches of such people.

So now our total is 581,000, and that’s without counting “education advisers and school inspectors” (23,000), social workers (96,000), probation officers (11,000), and 64,000 “other health professionals”, a good number of whom, I guess, are involved in “health education”.

The irony is that, when I was growing up, there was a caricature of English life that suggested society was rife with school caretakers, park keepers, bus conductors, village bobbies and the rest, all forever telling people to get off the grass, to pay the full fare, not a half, and not to cycle on the pavement. The difference is that those were, for all their faults, genuine authority figures.

We now have massed ranks of officials with no real authority.

Odds and ends on Saturday

I used to read John Grisham’s legal thrillers, back when the children were small, during our annual holidays in the west of Ireland. Packing the latest offering from the self-described “America’s favourite storyteller” was as much a part of the summer as picking up a hired car from Dan Dooley’s lot at Shannon Airport and filling a carrier bag with bottles of cheap booze courtesy of Aer Rianta.

Then I stopped. Not sure why, but I fear I succumbed to the kind of snobbery that is rarely far from a best-selling author.

The other day, short of something to read on the train, I picked up for a quid a second-hand copy of The Litigators (Hodder & Stoughton; 2012). It is one of the funniest books I have ever read. The opening few lines should give you a flavour:

The law firm of Finley & Figg referred to itself as a “boutique firm”. This misnomer was inserted as often as possible into routine conversations, and it even appeared in print in some of the various schemes hatched by the partners to solicit business. When used properly, it implied that Finley & Figg was something above your average two-bit operation. Boutique, as in small, gifted and expert in one specialised area. Boutique, as in pretty cool and chic, right down to the French-ness of the word itself. Boutique, as in thoroughly happy to be small, selective, and prosperous.

Except for its size, it was none of these things.

These hustlers are hilarious, especially when they land a proper case for which they are entirely unqualified. Think Sgt Bilko standing in for Perry Mason and you’ll get the idea.

I fear the worst for Sainsbury’s, based on my personal experience of our local branch. Until recently, I’ve been rather fond of the chain, right down to its warm, autumnal orange signature-colour. Having been blocked by competition regulators in its proposed merger with Asda, it seems to have given up. The card reader on the lottery/tobacco counter has been broken for months. The staff, once so helpful, no longer seem to know where anything is. There appear fewer tills open than in the old days. But at least the branch managed to put up its gay pride flags, so all is not lost.

SO farewell then Rory Stewart, the BBC/Foreign Office candidate for Tory leader. Presumably you thought at one point you had a chance of winning, which prompts me to ask what you were smoking. Oh hang on, actually you told us, didn’t you?

TO end where we began, with petty officialdom. Hardly had my train home started rolling last night than the driver or guard came over the address system to tell us there was a "professional beggar" on the train and that we should not give him anything, suggesting (wrongly) that we would be breaking the law. Preferring to do what i like with my own money without reference to grossly overpaid rail supernumeraries, I gave him some money. Meanwhile, a Minister has had to grovel after referring to rough sleepers as "tinkers", going on to praise the wonderful social contribution of Britain's gypsy community. A tinker, being a travelling mender of pots and pans, is no more likely to be of Romany origin than anything else (although thinking about it, my part-Romany mother was a dab hand at fixing things). A former boss used it as a term of approbation. If you pulled a big story, he would declare: "You little tinker!" Which meant (a) well done and (b) I really don't want to know how you did it.

15 June 2019 10:00 AM

SERGEANT Lewis, dogged sidekick to the inspired detective Inspector Morse, remarks in one episode that it would be good to get some new thinking in the police force. Thinking of any sort, Morse retorted, would make a welcome change.

That’s pretty much my reaction when asked for an opinion on the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) into financial markets. Whatever its source, intelligence can only benefit an industry hopelessly prone to bubbles, panics and the misallocation of capital.

That said, I fear aspects of AI’s supposedly-huge benefits may have been a little oversold, not least in terms of predictive power. This occurred to me, perhaps incongruously, when watching the BBC 2 series Thatcher: A very British revolution.

Specifically, the events leading up to the 1987 election underlined, indirectly, the critical dependence of AI on past data when making forecasts.

Hard to recall now, but quite a few people thought Margaret Thatcher and her party would be defeated when the country next went to the polls, which it did in June of that year.

There were four reasons for this belief, two reasonably well-founded, one arising from misleading opinion polls and one nonsensical.

One, the Tories had suffered a terrible 1986, which opened with the crisis/scandal surrounding the future of Westland, the helicopter maker and didn’t get much better. Three years into their second term, they looked seedy and worn out.

Two, in-fighting at the top of the party and Government in the run-up to the election, which, the programme showed, was more public than I remember, added to the impression of disarray.

Three, several opinion polls before and during the campaign itself suggested that the Conservatives could either lose their majority or simply be defeated.

Four, all historical arithmetic was against a Thatcher victory. Not one prime minister in modern times had served three consecutive terms. You would need to go back to the second Earl of Liverpool, from 1812 to 1827.

With that in mind, more recent parallels suggested themselves, consciously or subconsciously, notably Harold Wilson’s shock 1970 defeat, denying him a third consecutive term, although he was subsequently to win two more elections. Like Mrs Thatcher, Wilson had been the favourite to win. Like Mrs Thatcher, he faced an opponent who had been roughed up by the media and was not widely fancied for the job (Edward Heath/Neil Kinnock).

And what was the 1987 outcome? A majority of more than 100 seats, since which time the Conservatives scraped back in 1992, lost in 1997, 2001 and 2005, limped into office with the Liberal Democrats in 2010, scraped a majority in 2015 and lost it again two years later.

The polls didn’t cover themselves in glory 32 years ago, but a computer, of the sort some suggest ought to be put in charge of financial-market decision making, would have crunched the numbers and concluded that Labour was on its way to power. Which it was, but with a ten-year time delay.

Similarly, AI would, presumably, be predicting a leadership-race defeat for Boris Johnson. Why? Well, here’s the form book going back to 1965, the first occasion on which Conservative leaders were elected, rather than appointed by party grandees: 1965 favourite Reginald Maudling, winner Edward Heath; 1975 favourite (after Heath withdrew) William Whitelaw, winner Margaret Thatcher; 1990 favourite Michael Heseltine, winner John Major; 1997 favourite Kenneth Clarke, winner William Hague;

INTERESTING that, in the litany of opinion-poll errors, 1987 is the one everyone forgets, unlike 1970, February 1974, 1992 and 2015. Funnily enough, 1987 is also the hard winter that everyone forgets, unlike 1970, 1978/1979 and 1981/1982, not to mention more recent white-outs. In part, this may be because December 1986 had been very mild, and the cold spell, complete with heavy snowfall, didn’t strike until a week into January.

POST-1987, of course, Tony Blair went on to win three consecutive terms and no-one thought it odd. But then, these historical patterns always look jolly impressive until they are broken. I was 19 when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, and was told that no president elected in a year ending with a zero had ever left office alive, e.g. John Kennedy 20 years earlier. I think this was actually true at the time, but ceased to be so when Reagan served two full terms and died in June 2004, 15 years after leaving office. Similarly, George W. Bush is hale and hearty, despite the appalling jinx of having been elected in 2000.

YOU have probably heard of “Trump Derangement Syndrome”, the foaming hatred of non-supporters of the Great Dealmaker to the man himself. Equally funny is “Johnson Derangement Syndrome”, as members of polite society fall over themselves to be as impolite as possible about Boris of that Ilk. Their real beef with Johnson isn’t, as they claim, his inattention to detail or his occasional economising with the facts. It certainly isn’t the odd bouts of amnesia regarding his marriage vows – the standard polite-society response to such transgressions is to murmur sympathetically about “a tragedy for all concerned”. No, it’s that they thought he was one of them and it turns out he isn’t.

AND so, the giants depart the stage. Not since the passage of Attlee, Bevin, Cripps etc has there been a wave of emotion as accompanied the Tory leadership-contest farewells to Andrea Leadsom, Mark Harper, Matt Hancock and Esther McVey. Actually, I rather like this last, because, had my brother been a girl, he would have been called Esther.

08 June 2019 10:00 AM

POLITE society has been very active this week, not least in more-than-usually frenzied calls for assorted bans of things of which the allegedly high-minded disapprove.

Then there was the (narrow) Labour victory in Peterborough described by the new MP as a triumph for the “politics of hope”.

Sorry? Whenever a professional politician engages in Hope Speech, I ward off any temptation to succumb to this bilge by reminding myself of the words attributed to Kakuei Tanaka, the late Japanese Prime Minister: “Our guys want cash and positions.”

That sounds more like it.

In terms of proposed prohibitions, a brisk pace was set by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), with a report calling for heavy taxes on sugary food and sweets, plain packaging for confectionary and an advertising ban for any foodstuffs of which the Government disapproves.

The always-excellent Chris Snowdon, of the Institute of Economic Affairs, pointed out that these measures will have very little effect in “tackling obesity”, if any, adding: “These taxes and bans are not being demanded because they are effective at achieving certain policy goals, but because successive governments have shown themselves willing to introduce similar policies.

“Like many in the ‘public health’ lobby, the IPPR has clocked that the current Conservative Party has a weakness for nanny state policies.”

Weakness? An obsession, more like.

Snowdon was writing in The Sun, alongside an admirable leader demanding that Theresa May’s successor “must kill off the nanny state’s snobby war on treats”.

Not all papers took the same view. But then, where you stand on issues such as this is a pretty good indicator of whether you are in polite society – or outside it.

Other reliable tests include attitudes to the HS2 white-elephant railway line. On Wednesday, City AM quizzed Tory leadership hopefuls on whether they were for or against it. The full article is here, but suffice it to say that Boris Johnson, Rory Stewart, Andrea Leadsom and Esther McVey are against, while Jeremy Hunt, Sajid Javid and Matt Hancock are in favour.

And, of course, there is Brexit, the ultra-reliable acid test of “politeness”.

Then there was The Widdecombe Case, which sounds like a whodunnit by Jill Paton Walsh but refers instead to Ann of that ilk’s (now an MEP) suggestion that, given we are now supposed to believe it is possible for people to switch from male to female and vice versa, we may be expected to believe in future that people can change their sexuality.

Cue much outrage, not least in the Daily Express, in what may be its own attempt to join polite society (far, far too late, guys). The prestigious leader-page slot was given to Julie Bindel (who I normally admire) to condemn the notion of ”gay conversion therapy” and, in a footnote to a separate piece, to call for it to be banned.

Just three minor points. One, Widdecombe (herself an Express columnist) did not advocate gay conversion therapy, merely asked why someone who is unhappy as a man or woman is helped, while someone unhappy about being gay, or, indeed, straight is, usually, not

Two, such therapy sounds pretty fraudulent to me, but so does “gender fluidity”.

Three, if we are going to “ban” one type of charlatan, where does it end? With mediums, fortune tellers, spiritualists, people who claim to know who someone was in a previous life (“I see you at the court of the Pharaoh…”)?

The courtrooms and jails will be bursting.

Back to the food-ad ban and allied measures, Snowdon points out that: “If all of the Government's proposals go ahead, the UK will have one of the most restrictive food markets in the world.”

How have we got into this position? I suspect, in large part, because corporate lobbyists have fallen down on the job.

That may surprise those of you told constantly that such lobbyists are shadowy, brilliantly-effective operators who manage to stymie most attempts by the benign, wise authorities to curb the activities of their big-business paymasters. And it is true that British lobbyists aren’t bad at hand to hand fighting, but pretty useless at long-range shelling.

Let me explain by way of a fictional example. Some years ago, a paperclip tax was imposed on those useful little items in order to reduce metal consumption and waste, and also to spur office automation in order to make Britain more competitive.

Ahead of the latest Budget, the Treasury trails plans to treble the paperclip tax, at which point the paperclip industry’s lobbyists go into action across the board: geeing up sympathetic MPs to oppose the rise, corralling the relevant trade unions to talk up the threat to jobs, lining up experts to claim the tax will not affect the rate of use of metal, arranging for assorted business suits to warn of the dire effect on our export trade…and so on.

The proposal is dropped.

But lobbyists are hopeless at raising the question of why there is a paperclip tax at all. That is what I mean by long-range shelling – it seems never to occur to them to challenge the premise on which the proposed hike is based, i.e. the original tax itself, which is treated as a given.

Conservatives used to claim that there was a ratchet effect, whereby every Labour Government nationalised more of the economy while the Tories, when in office, did nothing to reverse this. Margaret Thatcher put paid to that, but the ratchet effect today is seen in the field of prohibition and regulation.

And Conservative administrations seem as keen on pushing people around as anyone else.

The test of time

I have reviewed for the Lion & Unicorn site Brian Aldiss’s 1980 novel Life in the West. As always, I try to keep review to 1,000 words, so bits and pieces are left on the workbench. Among them this time are an encounter with an old colleague of the main character, who is emigrating to Australia: "[T]he oil crisis isn't going to go away. Inflation isn't going to go down...Nothing's ever going to be the same again. We're going to go down the drain, till we end up like a lot of little Uruguays and Paraguays...We''ll have to team up with the Soviet Bloc in the end, just to keep going."

But I fear Aldiss needs a consultant discographer. "He switched on the car radio. He recognised the music at once. The Tom Robinson Band playing Long Hot Summer." As this is June 1977, I don't think so. The TRB's first single had to await the autumn of that year, and it was called something else.

01 June 2019 10:00 AM

I’m pretty sure it was Morgan Grenfell, once a great name in City merchant banking, now disappeared, that introduced Britain’s first “tracker” investment funds.

The idea was simplicity itself. Rather than try to beat the market average, as expressed in various stock-price indices – the Dow Jones, the FTSE and so on – these funds would simply buy all the shares in those indices, in the same proportion as they were represented in the index concerned.

So, investors buying these funds could never do any better than the average market performance, but neither could they do any worse.

Round about the same time – the late Eighties – a second, fairly novel, investment vehicle was trundled out for the delectation of investors, the ethical investment fund. We all know the score here: no shares in arms companies, tobacco manufacturers, brewers, distillers, blue-movie producers…and the rest.

After a few years, cheerleaders for ethical funds were claiming that they were outperforming the market average. That meant you could keep a clear conscience and actually make more money than those who were backing nasty, unethical companies called things like Guided Missiles PLC and Cine Rumpy-Pumpy. Oh, happy day!

Such claims are still being made, or at least hinted at, as in a piece in The Daily Telegraph on Wednesday, headed: “Why taking the moral high ground can pay off”.

And “hinted at” is key here, because, to be fair, the Telegraph article did not (unlike the stronger claims that have been made since the early Nineties for ethical investing) claim that those who had shunned tobacco, alcohol and coal (this last is now a no-no but barely on the ethical hit-list 30 years ago) had cleaned up, merely that, by following ethical standards, they were well-placed to do so.

Also last week, we heard that an investment fund whose central principle is to select shares in companies that empower women (or something like that) was also outperforming the average, like all those ethical funds, and doubtless it is.

But looking back over the last 30 years, one or two questions present themselves.

If everyone is piling into “ethical” shares, then it is quite true that the price of the shares will rise above the market average, but the yield, by definition, will fall below that average, because the yield measures the income you are buying, in the form of dividends, against what you paid for it.

It follows from this that for total returns – the dividend plus whatever you get when you finally sell the shares – to be above average, then the price for which you sell must be sufficiently above average to compensate for the excess you paid for the dividend stream.

Not only does this reliance on capital gains as opposed to dividend income have overtones of the sort of “fast buck” investing that the ethical managers are assumed to deplore, but it raises the spectre of a “green bubble” that may well burst.

Meanwhile, what is happening to the unethical stocks? The idea that simply no-one is buying them is fanciful, not least because, as their price declines, they become increasingly attractive, as does the yield, given investors would be paying less for the dividend income, in a mirror-image of the position with the ethical shares.

In the unlikely event that ethical funds (now known as ESG, for “environmental, social and governance”) turn the unethical shares into the pariahs of the stock market and drive them out, said pariahs would probably de-list their shares and go private, raising capital from private investors and banks. Thus, they would deprive ordinary investors of the chance to buy their shares, but I wonder if we would be told that the remaining, 100 per cent ethical stock market was “outperforming the market”.

Saturday miscellany

ELSEWHERE in Wednesday’s Telegraph, Jeremy Warner, after an inspection of some of the most egregious features of current British politics and economics (such as sub-inflation gilt yields that mean investors are paying the Government for the privilege of lending it money), concluded: “Our politics are becoming as unpredictable as a banana republic.” True, and Larry Elliott and I predicted just this in a book we wrote in 2012, Going South (Palgrave Macmillan). Latest to line up in this Third World tribute act are the judges, who will, apparently, put Boris Johnson on trial for “lying” re. Brexit. Well, we all know what the wigged ones think of the referendum result.

HERE’S the latest Euro-wheeze doing the rounds among the establishment elite, courtesy of yesterday’s edition of their house newspaper The Times. If you thought the idea of a second referendum was repulsive, how about simply revoking Article 50 and keeping us in the European Union – withouta second referendum at all? A Times leader yesterday suggested the Liberal Democrats propose just this next time they go to the voters.

ON a related subject, they’re off! Doubtless you can feel the excitement as the Lib Dems’ leadership race begins. It’s looking quite hopeful for those of us who would like the party to disappear in order to leave space for a proper liberal party, i.e. one that believes in liberty rather than banning things and overturning the referendum result. Front runners Jo Swinson and Sir Ed Davey look promisingly useless. Can we close the lists now, please, in case someone decent turns up?

MY train was cancelled this morning, a not-uncommon experience on route operated by the staggeringly-useless Southern-Thameslink “railway” operator. This routinely-pitiful performance did not deter them from repeatedly broadcasting an exhortation to carry a bottle of water when travelling in hot weather. Would you dream of taking medical advice from these cretins?

FINALLY, two questions for Bill Gates and his heirs and successors at Microsoft. One, if you’re all so clever, why is Bing, rival search engine to Google, so useless and why is your “news” service MSN so pointless and irritating? Two, how can I disable both these features on my computer?

25 May 2019 10:00 AM

And no, I don’t want one of the days off in the early part of the year moved to the middle of the Autumn. That’s one of those horrible, tidy-minded ideas beloved of the sort of people who also propose permanent British Summer Time, a fixed date for Easter and fluoride in everyone’s water and who used to want us to drive on the right and join the euro.

Liberal Democrats, in other words.

More intriguing is the idea of making every weekend a long weekend, with the introduction of a four-day week. I actually worked a four-day week, back in the Eighties, at that fine news agency the General Press Service, so have some experience of this. Here are some things to bear in mind.

One, the origins were a bit murky. I think the idea originated during the years of pay controls in the Seventies, with the four-day week acting as a non-cash “pay rise”.

Two, each day was supposed to be ten hours long, although in my case the shift fell a good hour short of that on most days.

Three, on taking promotion (to assistant news editor or equivalent grade), you gave it up in return for more money. The thinking clearly was that four-day weeks were all very well for working grunts but the officer class was expected to put in a rather more solid appearance.

Four, this was a good arrangement from the employee point of view, because the point of being “officer class” was that you’d get the work done anyway, regardless of watching the clock. So take the money…

Fifth, when I went to The Guardian I found myself on a four and a half day week, otherwise known as the nine-day fortnight. The problem was the same, in that this generous leave entitlement (including six weeks’ holiday and eight bank holidays) didn’t always get taken.

I’m not knocking the idea. But in the age of mobiles, e-mails and constantly-contactable wage slaves, it’s a bit less radical than it would have been 30 years ago, when a silently-mouthed “Say I’m out” to one’s spouse or companion when they took the call would have been enough to head the bosses off at the pass.

Saturday miscellany

PIP pip, Theresa May. Rather like your immediate predecessor (but to a more pronounced extent) you seemed to measure your nice-person status by the extent to which you wheedled to people and organisations that will always hate you and your party. In your case, this opponent-hugging ranged all the way from our European enemies to the “trans” lobby. Dave tried to suck up to the “teacher unions” by sacking their hate figure Michael Gove, and was then shocked – shocked! – when Gove refused to back his pitiful “renegotiation” of Britain’s European Union membership thus helped pave the way for Cameron’s unlamented exit from Downing Street.

APPARENTLY, it’s BBC “women in sport” week this week. Isn’t it every week?

RADIO 4 has been reprising these past few days some of the work of Jeremy Hardy, who died earlier this year. The radical comedian was praised on his death for having been hard-hitting but never nasty. This is from Kenneth Clarke’s memoir Kind of Blue (Macmillan; 2016), referring to the pressures on his wife Gillian of shot and shell on the political battlefield: “Gillian made an angry and distressed call to the BBC after the comedian Jeremy Hardy had said that there were still some things that made life worthwhile - birdsong in the spring…and the prospect of seeing Kenneth Clarke go to his grave”. As Paul Johnson said in a different context, De mortuis nil nisi bunkum.

THE news that Oxford University is establishing a quota of places to be set aside for "disprivileged kids" must surely be the final spur the top independent schools need to establish an elite university of their own? To proof itself against interference by dribbling-idiot "Ministers" and bureaucrats, it should avoid charitable status, involvement in the student loan scheme and any other form of State subsidy.

I have resisted Hunter S. Thompson all my life, not least because I consider the notion of a “gonzo journalist” (a drug addict with a press card) to be about as meaningless as a “gonzo air-traffic controller”. So I resisted him. Until now. For £1, I picked up a near-pristine paperback copy of his collection The Great Shark Hunt (Picador; 1980), and I’ve been 75 per cent won over. The best of this stuff is genuinely good reporting, which I think I can recognise even if I haven’t always delivered it myself. And the 25 per cent? His obsessions, mainly his hatred of former President Nixon, which is far more deranged than the derangements of which Thompson accuses Tricky Dicky. He is scarcely less unbalanced in his loathing of Nixon’s 1968 Democrat opponent, the former Vice-President Hubert Humphrey. But there’s some great stuff here.

THIS is just a tiny taster. It is 1972, and Senator George McGovern is campaigning to deny Nixon a second term. The Democrat challenger’s press secretary is called Kirby Jones. “If McGovern says today that the most important issue in the California primary is abolition of the sodomy statutes, Kirby will do everything in his power to convince everybody on the press bus that the sodomy statutes must be abolished…and if George decides tomorrow that his pro-sodomy gig isn’t making it with the voters, Kirby will get behind a quick press release to the effect that ‘new evidence from previously obscure sources’ has convinced the Senator that what he really meant to say was that sodomy itself should be abolished.”

18 May 2019 10:00 AM

WHEN reaching a certain age, it becomes possible to pass some sort of preliminary judgment on the forecasts and predictions with which the air was thick when you were younger.

For example, it was about 40 years ago that what was then known as the “silicon chip” arrived on the public consciousness. The first visible manifestation of the “micro” (its alternative name) was the replacement in offices of electric typewriters with “word processors”.

To the uninitiated, it sounded as if these devices would do the actual writing, but, of course, they were simply typewriters with screens instead of A4 and carbon paper.

More generally, the question of what the chip would actually mean for the economy was something that sharply divided opinion. From memory, one book suggested a permanent rise to four million unemployed or more as new technology wiped out swathes of jobs.

Another book took the opposite view, arguing that the microprocessor had been oversold and that any displaced jobs would be replaced by new ones.

Bernard Levin, in The Times, was similarly unconvinced by the notion that the chip promised/threatened an economic revolution. In his lifetime, Levin, there had been previous “revolutions”.

One was nuclear power, sold as being able to power the Queen Mary round the world on a piece of fuel the size of a walnut. Another was factory automation and the “efficiencies” it would bring.

Last sighted, said Levin, the Queen Mary was stuck at Long Beach, California, and Britain’s factories (this was before Mrs Thatcher fully hit her stride) were monuments to inefficiency.

To date, with more people in work than ever before, events seem to have borne out Book Two and Levin rather than Book One. But it’s a long game and this is very much an interim verdict.

More interesting may be a comparatively-unusual predictive book from that era, by Gordon Pask and Susan Curran, Micro Man (Century Publishing; 1982). Much of the (fascinating) text is concerned with the history and development of computers, but towards the end there is a section entitled: “The best and worst of possible worlds.”

Three future scenarios are imagined.

Here’s one that has held up pretty well:

“It is AD 2002. First children, and then adults, have become addicted to microprocessors of the kind available in 1982, but with greater storage capacity…Their addiction to peeky, linearised images of reality is so strong that when they do converse (and micro freaks are notoriously taciturn) they do so through their micros in programmatic terms.”

Sounds about right.

But more intriguing, I think, is a future scenario that has, in truth, relatively little to do with computers. A “Togetherness Movement”, originating in California, spreads to Europe and a “Togetherness Party” takes power (this is all happening round about now).

Its aim is that “everyone shares their psyche with everyone else”. Thus: “A typical statute…prohibits impediments to communication by physical boundaries of any kind. Property developers leap upon the bandwagon, and construct estates full of transparent and unsound-proofed buildings.”

A bizarre prediction, on the face of it, and one that has been completely falsified. Or has it?

True, we don’t have see-through blocks of flats, but hasn’t “togetherness”, under the guise of “community cohesion”, “British values” and “bringing our country together” become a key plank of Britain’s official ideology?

It can be seen in such strength-through-joy campaigns as those to encourage cycling or women’s football, in health promotions in which we are enjoined to do our bit, not least to alleviate pressure on “our” NHS, in demands that social media companies do not “allow” their customers to read only the sort of news with which they agree and that (presumably State) schools ought to be barred from faith-based admissions policies.

This last view is put forward in an article here suggesting religion is all very well in the home and at weekends, but that we should “let our children be together to learn the things they all need to know”. Such a statement implies that “school” is a neutral dissemination mechanism for universally agreed “facts” when education is, of course, highly ideological – not least in “togetherite” Britain.

Anyway, Pask and Curran’s “together” scenario is not without its problems. Occupants of transparent buildings “express opposition to the whole idea”. No kidding?

Saturday miscellany

A busy few days for the Grim Reaper, with farewells to Doris Day, Bob Hawke and, of course, Labour MP turned TV interrogator Brian Walden. You’d need to be of a certain age (see above) to recall Walden in his prime, in particular his brilliant technique. Typically, a senior hack politician would respond to a very wide question with an utterly bland statement (e.g. “it’s early days for the round-table talks on the future of Northern Ireland but we are hopeful”).

“Ah!” Walden would respond. “Now that’s very interesting.”

Alarm on the face of the hack politician, who did not imagine he had said anything much at all. Walden goes on to suggest that saying “early days” displays optimism that there will be “later days”, i.e. the talks will succeed.

Furious back-pedalling from the hack politician, who blurts out that everything is proving very difficult and could go wrong at any time. Lead item on the next news bulletin? “Round-table talks are on the point of collapse.”

MY first paper, when stuck for a story to fill a hole, would get some local councillor to refer to a notorious road-accident blackspot with the evergreen quote: “Must a child die before action is taken?” Aren’t all these “May urged to set departure date” items just a Westminster version of the same thing?

FAREWELL also to Jean Vanier, Canadian founder of the L’Arche disability charity. He spoke one Palm Sunday at Mass at Worth Abbey, opening his remarks: “I have longed to eat this meal with you.” If you are going to quote someone, why not go right to the top?”

CHRISTOPHER Booker recalls that, at the height of David Frost’s fame on both sides of the Atlantic, a baffled Arthur Koestler (author and intellectual) had to ask who Frost actually was. I feel the same way about Jeremy Kyle.

11 May 2019 10:00 AM

IN this week’s edition of The Spectator, Rory Sutherland, columnist and vice-chairman of Ogilvy UK, mentions in passing the long-ago injunction of Hong Kong financial secretary Sir John James Cowperthwaite that no economic statistics be collected because it would only encourage politicians to intervene in the economy.

Those of us who have no problem with government intervention have never been overly impressed, despite his having been credited with Hong Kong’s “Asian tiger” status.

But could he not have had a point about official statistics, albeit not the one he actually made?

I may not mind, even approve, political intervention in the economy, but have long railed against political intervention in private life. Indeed, it is noticeable that the decline of the former in the Eighties and Nineties was accompanied by the rise of the latter.

Along with this process, the search area for official data has expanded well beyond the big index numbers of yore – inflation, trade, growth, and so on – into some considerably more dubious areas, as if designed to lay the ground for more official interference in private lives.

From the recent release calendar of the Office for National Statistics (ONS), we have data for “Living alone: one-person households”. Why? Is it to justify the “loneliness Minister” that Theresa May has deemed a necessary component of her government?

Then there is “Exploring loneliness in children, Great Britain: 2018”. Are national statisticians the right people to explore children’s loneliness?

Some cases are borderline. “Socio-economic inequalities in avoidable mortality in England and Wales 2001-2017” is a topic that could yield some objective, useful data. Could.

And the main trouble with “Crime in England and Wales: year ending December 2018” is that decreasing numbers of people actually believe official crime figures.

Utterly clear-cut is the release headed “Developing a measure of controlling or coercive behaviour”. This is a classic example of the self-reinforcing loop between politics and official statistics.

The highly questionable offence of “controlling or coercive behaviour” was dreamed up during Mrs May’s tenure as Home Secretary and, to some of us, seemed to give the authorities a laissez-passer into relationships of which they disapproved. Now the statisticians are, apparently, going to give some spurious credibility to the whole notion.

Finally, what about “Personal and economic well-being in the UK: April 2019”? Here, in a nutshell, are the new and the old, economic statistics of relevance to the authorities in their task of trying to make everyone better off alongside dubious data relating to how people “feel”.

Thus, economic well-being is measured by disposable income. Fine. And personal well-being is, apparently, to do with “anxiety levels”. No thanks

We need, I feel, the spirit of old Hong Kong.

Saturday miscellany

OFF at a tangent is something that occurred to me on reading the (very fine and highly recommended) second of three volumes of the memoirs of former Cabinet Minister Alan Johnson, Please, Mr Postman (Bantam Press; 2014). Together with the first volume, we learned the following: that the young Alan, effectively orphaned, was spared a children’s home because his 16-year-old sister persuaded the child welfare people to give them a council flat and she raised him; that postmen in the Sixties and Seventies would combine their delivery rounds with moonlighting as paper boys in remote areas; that they would also feed pet cats by arrangement with the householder when they were on holiday, and that they would even deliver coal, potatoes and manure for people, and give lifts in their vans.

I assume Mr Johnson is aware that none of the above could happen now and that, although the rot set in during the late Eighties, the real “nationalisation of private life” occurred during the New Labour years, in which he played a prominent role.

NEW Defence Secretary Penny Mordaunt declares that British forces veterans will not be “pursued unfairly” through the courts over “unfounded allegations”. Take out the “not” in that last sentence to appreciate fully the banality of this statement.

INTRIGUING planning notices from the City of London published in City AM on Tuesday. In Great St Helen’s, EC3, there is to be a “temporary installation of a sculpture ‘It was only a matter of time before we found the Pyramid and forced it open’, by Salvatore Arancio…to be taken down on or before June 1 2020”. Over in Bishopsgate, EC2, there is to be the temporary installation of another sculpture, for the same period, this being “Stagnight”, by Michael Lyons. In Leadenhall Street, the temporary sculpture will be “Within a realm of relative form”, by Lawrence Weiner. No fewer than 11 such temporary installations are listed by the City authorities. Amid all this artistry, it is almost a relief to come across a planning notice relating to premises in Old Broad Street, EC2: “Installation of a new shopfront.”

May Bank Holiday Monday last week saw a fine piece of drama on Radio 4, Road to Oxford, by Douglas Livingstone. You can still catch it on the replay thing – it went out at 2.15pm on May 6. The backdrop being Oxford’s May morning jollities, this put me in mind of an ill-fated expedition many years ago to the city of dreaming spires. It was 1987 or 1988, and a friend and I heard that the pubs stayed open all day on May Day (this was just before all-day opening came to England and Wales). This isn’t really true anyway, and even if it were, we travelled on the bank holiday Monday which, as in most years including this one, did not coincide with May 1. Inevitable disappointment when we collided with reality. Nothing for it but to retreat to the one place where drink could be served at any time – British Rail.

04 May 2019 10:00 AM

A fortnight ago, I meandered into the whole question of fractional reserve banking, the ability of banks to re-lend more than £90 of every pound deposited, meaning that £90, when re-deposited, becomes the base for £80 of fresh loans, and so on…until the last ten per cent is gone.

Thus, I wrote, is money created in the modern world - essentially, because someone has gone into debt.

What a con.

Thanks to a paper sent by a friend and reader, I now discover this is just an intermediate con and the real racket lies one step beyond, with banks simply creating money out of thin air. Once I have a proper grasp of this, I’ll get back to you on it.

In the meantime, here’s a second of the Big Three con tricks, limited corporate liability. I wrote my second ever opinion piece for The Guardian on this, and afterwards was, I believe, regarded round the office as a somewhat overcaffeinated young man, albeit jolly enthusiastic.

You wait, I thought. This one is going to blow.

That was 29 years ago. Still, one day…

Limited liability is a wonderful wheeze whereby business owners can walk away from their debts, leaving society – whether trade creditors or employees – to pick up the pieces. Long before the financial crisis, this was the original case of profits being privatised and losses socialised.

All you need to enter this magic protection racket are those little letters PLC (in Britain), Inc (US), SA (France), Pty Ltd (Australia), and so on…

Surely, you ask, there is more to it than that?

Not really, although there are a couple of qualifications.

The first is that, while anyone can apply to incorporate their enterprise, the value of limited liability is, er, limited for smaller businesses. Banks and other lenders aren’t stupid (whatever signs there may be to the contrary) and will usually demand a personal guarantee from the owner or owners before advancing a loan.

The second is that, since 1986, it has been possible to pursue the directors of a company for civil damages for creditors if they can be shown to have knowingly traded while insolvent or failed to minimise the loss to creditors.

Other than that, this is pretty much a one-way bet.

But its justification is hard to fathom. Laws against theft of property or injury to the person are pretty easy to explain to the proverbial man from Mars in terms of natural justice. But by what right does an inanimate company become a person in law, required to hand over to its (human) owners all the money it makes but to retain in its fictional persona the money it loses?

The only half-plausible explanation I have ever heard is that limited liability allows companies to continue beyond the lifespans of their founders. But surely some legal mechanism can be devised to deliver this benefit that doesn’t involve shrugging off hard-to-pay debts?

Oh, and the third con mentioned earlier? The mysterious concept of “trusts”, the only non-human entities that can own their own assets without themselves having a human owner.

But that’s for another day.

When everyone’s responsible, no-one is

I rolled up at the polling station Thursday evening not entirely sure which local authorities were submitting their representatives for re-election: West Sussex (county), Mid-Sussex (district) or the town council (what would be a parish council in rural areas). It turned out to be these last two, but it does make you wonder why we, in common with much of England, need three tiers of local government.

On a piece for the Lion & Unicorn site in August 2015, I went into this question in more detail but for now I’d just say that I suspect the present system – muddied lines of authority and itty-bitty elections in which some councillors are up for election some times and others at others – suits local and national bureaucrats just fine. No accountability to the voters whatsoever. Bliss!

Miscellany on Saturday

TIME was when business names were reasonably self-explanatory: Harrison & Co, brewer/motor mechanic/auctioneer. Now we live in the age of assorted “service” outfits with names such as Magenta 9. Here are some of the people who contributed to City AM this week, complete with their job descriptions.

On Tuesday:

Jennifer Emery is global people leader at Arup, and the author of Leading for organisational change

Emily Foges is chief executive of Luminance

On Wednesday:

Lucinda Kingham is senior account executive at Firefly Communications

On Thursday:

Adrian Moorhouse is managing director of Lane4

Don’t go down the mine, dad.

AT London Bridge this week, we endured a mid-afternoon practice alarm, which involved a good couple of minutes of honking sirens interspersed with calls for “Inspector Sands”, the rail people’s babyish “code” for anti-terrorist police. This was followed by: “Due to [they meant ‘owing to’, but never mind] a public emergency, passengers must leave this area immediately. Please obey the instructions of staff.” Obey a lot of ticket collectors? Don’t think so.

SOME time after everyone else, I have read my first Martyn Waites novel, a spooky thriller called The Old Religion (ZAFFRE; 2019). Very good too. I should have skipped the author interview at the end, much of which comprised a boilerplate lovey anti-Brexit rant about how Leave voters were “lied to”. But I read it. First and, I fear, the last.

CAN I ask private-school heads and other defenders of independent education to stop using the language of their enemies? This week, Barnaby Lenon, the former headmaster of Harrow, in an otherwise fine address, was just the latest to speak against the “abolition” of independent schools. The State can “abolish” only those entities that it owns: grammar schools, the Trooping of the Colour, capital punishment, Westmoreland County Council, the Educational Maintenance Allowance – even the monarchy. Regarding independent schools, it can “prohibit”, "suppress" or “ban” them, both words sounding suitably menacing.

I can't be the first to suggest that, given the uselessness of the British State, the sacking of Gavin Williamson as Defence Secretary may prove a replay of Peter Mandelson's 2001 Cabinet departure over the "Hinduja passport affair." In other words, we'll find he did nothing wrong.

PPS TO end where we began. Many years ago, in a friendly argument about the (to me) iniquities of limited liability, my interlocutor said that even were it to be swept away, one could recreate all the benefits with a fairly simple and inexpensive insurance policy, available for businesses.

Was he not, I asked, forgetting something?

What?

The insurance companies themselves would no longer enjoy limited liability. No-one would. The party would be over.